Career opportunity in SAP? Just Say No (long, dull)

The BBQ Pit
1

If anyone ever suggests a career as an administrator in the widely-used business software suite SAP, trust me, ignore them. If you value your soul, your sanity, and the precious time you have on Earth, that is. Experienced SAP administrators can make 100K a year. But don’t think about that. Think about Dr. Faust and that deal he made. Let me tell you about the world of pain that SAP admins inhabit…

SAP documentation is appalling. The many error messages their products churn out are unhelpful or downright misleading. The search engine on their spectacularly bad support website (supposedly a showcase for SAP’s Enterprise Portal product, but in fact persuasive evidence that you should not touch that product with a bargepole) returns page after page of irrelevant technical minutae or vapid marketing drivel for every one relevant hit (it seems that it is mandatory for SAP documents to be full of Bullshit Bingo phrases like “integrated business processes” and “leveraged data silos”). You spend literally hours wading through cruft on the off-chance that you might stumble upon the bit of information that you need.

Installing SAP software, or “deploying” it, to use their ghastly terminology, can be a days-long nightmare. SAP tacitly acknowledge this, providing helpful tools such as the laughably named Rapid Installer to guide you through the bewildering maze of prerequisites, dependencies and options that you must negotiate to even have a chance of completing an installation. Except they apparently don’t test these tools much, because they are flakier than the Singing Detective’s skin after a day in the sun. I lost many hours once during an install because I had the cheek to include a space in a directory name on one of the numerous pages of options. The SAP installer wasn’t prepared for this daringly modern idea and promptly fell over, the error logs full of detailed information about everything except the actual problem, of course.

You might be thinking “Man, I feel your pain - I had to set up an Oracle DBMS once and that thing is a bitch to install.” No. You have no fucking conception of just how tortuous a procedure setting up SAP software is. Oracle, J2EE servers, these things are mere children’s toys, paragons of elegant simplicity compared to SAP.

I won’t dwell upon the staggering amounts of disk space and RAM that SAP’s bloatware requires merely to tick over. Or SAP’s proprietary instincts, so strong that their awful, butt-ugly GUI client uses their own buttons and widgets rather than the ones that come with your operating system, and as a result looks, feels, and works nothing like any other software you have ever used. They even have their own network protocol, TCP/IP apparently not being good enough for SAP despite the fact that everybody else in the world uses it, and you can’t use anything as vulgar as PING to troubleshoot network problems. You must use SAP’s NIPING instead. It’s the worst case of Not Invented Here syndrome ever recorded.

What I don’t get is that SAP is somehow one of the world’s most succesful software companies. They are perpetrators of a huge scam primarily designed to earn fat fees for them and the army of consultant parasites. Their expensive products are snake oil and their customers credulous fools.

Yes, I hate my job. Why do you ask?

2

I hate SAP with a burning passion that only rivals the other dozen or so other borderline unusable software packages that our corporation’s board of directors has, in its wisdom, purchased in order to “increase productivity”.

I will say, though, that SAP is the only program (so far) that has caused tears of rage and frustration to well up in my eyes and for me to have to fight an overwheming urge to smash the computer to bits.

3

S.A.P. = Superior Arian Product.

:rolleyes:

4

I am a computer programmer. I’ve been programming ever since I was a kid. I’ve used lots of different languages and programming environments, including both open source and proprietary stuff, on many different platforms. I’ve written web applications, data processing tools, games, and even a robot controller. I implimented a simple network stack for homework once, and I’ve managed networks large and small for various jobs. I understand how computers work. I get networks and communications.

One time, I asked a friend of mine, a professional SAP administrator, what the hell SAP was, anyway.

Three hours later he still wasn’t able to explain it to me. And to this day I have no fucking clue.

5

I’ve never installed or programmed SAP, but I’ve served as a consultant for companies that use it. Our role was usually to find some way to work around it so that they could more easily extract the data that SAP made so hard to get to, even if it meant low-tech solutions like linked spreadsheets or Access front ends.

One very large corporate client had a major loss of productivity for 18 months after a deployment, mainly because they had to overhaul their business practices to match SAP’s processes. So after spending untold millions of dollars, executives were using spreadsheets and Access databases.

I feel your pain. The only thing I can think of to explain SAP’s success (at least in my experience) is the Holy Grail of the '90’s that data wharehouses were going to solve all business data problems.

6

“wharehouse” = warehouse. Don’t even know my own lingo.

7

Heresy? on top of everything else? :eek:

My department was thinking of changing to SAP as its financial software, but has held off because there is now a move to a single standard financial system for the whole federal government. The rumoured front runner is SAP. My friends in departments which already use SAP hate it. However, our present financial system is one that has had full (well, sorta*) accrual accounting functionality pasted onto a 20-year-old patches-on-patches budgeting system, so SAP will probably be an improvement.

(*Yes, it supports monthly accruals and amortization of capital assets, using the Manual Transaction Input™ function. Reports? sure, look at these great budget expense reports! Asset and liability and revenue? What part of budget expenses are those?)

8

Im an SAP developer, and it works fine for my company. If you want to know what has spawned an error message, take a note of its number eg HA321 and go to the message definition part of the system, do a where used on the message, and see what condition spawns it. This will require that you be able to read ABAP of course. The OSS search on the SAP site takes some getting used to, but the effort is worth it, there is a wealth of knowledge on there.

9

Are all the error messages in English yet? Last time I used it some were still in German.

10

we’re on version 4.7 and all the messages I see are in English. The commenting in the code on the other hand is still German.

11

An old girlfriend and one of my best friends used to work for SAP. I can only begin to tell you the horror stories about that place. You think using the system is bad, try actually working there.

I agree with everything the OP says. I hear this from all their friends who used to work there. My last company was contemplating SAP or Oracle for its ERP deployment, but instead chose to go with a bevy of smaller companies who specialize in the various areas (financials, ordering, manufacturing, HR, etc.) and connect everything with business object. SAP supposedly can do it, but at thrice the price and 5x’s as slow.

My current company uses it right now. Talk about ugly. Of course, you can pay the exorbitant for their professional service consultants to design it for you. I swear, the software exhibits all the bad stereotypes of all things German. Anyway, we have to keep restating our financials every month, because it took us that long to overcome errors in the reporting. The information was there, of course, it was just that SAP didn’t say what it was, or miscalculated it (error in the initial deployment). It’s gotten so bad, my senior officers want to sue. I’ve checked, and they get sued a lot. Of course, my friend told me their strategic negotiation rate for law suits; we don’t want any more of that craptastic software.

12

(SAP isn’t superior to anything, at least in a good way)

No, try these two:

To some of their customers,
SAP = Send Another Payment

to an overwhelming majority of their customers:

SAP = Sudden Anal Penetration
:eek:

13

I work for a Top 50 corporation. We use SAP. What used to be a series of disjointed but effective processes before SAP are now a series of disjointed but completely ineffective processes.

We have entire teams of high paid techs who do nothing but progam appeals to SAP to spit out the information we need to do our jobs.

One day some high ranking manager will ditch SAP. And we shall rejoice.

14

I support PeopleSoft. It’s a pain in the ass. And when my fellow drudges complain about it being a pain in the ass, I say, “Yes, it is a pain in the ass, but consider yourself lucky, because believe me, it could be a hell of a lot worse.” Compared to SAP, working with PeopleSoft is like oral sex.

15

Ugh. When I worked for Armstrong I had to interact with SAP. GAAAH! Horrible, totally non-intuitive (hell, the damn thing is almost anti-intuitive!), confusing, arcane, and obscure crap. And I was just a temp peon, not a manager or an IT tech!

16

I’m also a programmer, with about 15 years experience in software in general.

I have no idea what SAP is, and everything I find with a Google search assumes one knows what it is already.

17

It’s a synergistic suite of powerful enterprise-level applications that leverage each others core strengths in order to provide one of the most frequently used software suits for managing horizintal management of al business needs.

(It’s a big-ass software suite for running the finances and such geared towards really big companies. AFAIK. I don’t quite get it myself. We use PeopleSoft, which also sucks.)

18

SAP workflow admin checking in. I also support the AP/AR and FICO modules. I hate the bastard. Unintuitive, expensive and an all around bag of shite.

I worked on the project from day one and was told what to expect from the consultants during our many drinking sessions. The training is terrible. Generic muck which doesn’t help you deal with a real life system. SAP don’t support any customisation. Any workable system will be heavily customised. This means we have to deal with a 3rd party for our ABAP development etc as the company is too cheap to pay for a full timer.

Horrible, horrible shit… but it pays the bills I suppose :slight_smile:

19

No, no, NO!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!

The users shouldn’t have to put in the effort. The effort should be made by the goddamn developers so that every end user won’t have to make the effort that the developers couldn’t bother themselves with.

20

I was constantly getting the feeling that every time I searched for a transaction with SAP, I was missing data. Nothing definite, just the feeling that it wasn’t grabbing what I asked for, and instead was grabbing things around it in the database. Like I was asking for the net and getting the holes.

It was so bad that when Armstrong’s hardwood-flooring division wanted to track returns to the big-box hardware stores, they had me develop an Excel spreadsheet rather than depending on SAP to return accurate data.